Friday, May 18, 2007

Honey Pot Marketing

If you are a small consultant or a niche business, it is not always easy (or even possible) to target a prospect base. This is especially the problem if you are targeting startups even before they have public records, as is the case for our business naming services. We don’t know where the next person or small team is that is seeking a name for their new company. Many don’t even know that naming agencies like ours exist, or they have been scared off by the prices at the famous branding agencies.

So how can we reach them? Marketing 101 has told us to focus our efforts on our key target audience. Yet we don’t know who they are, or where they are, or even what management titles to track down.

But when the police (real or virtual) want to catch the bad guys, and they don’t know where they are, or what name they are using nowadays, what do they do? They put out the honey pots and attract the bears instead of chasing them all over the woods. They don’t know which honey pot will work, so they make a variety of them and spread them around in the areas where the bears are purported to exist, and they wait. (Did they learn this trick from the porno guys themselves?)

So what if we made a great honey pot on the internet and waited for them to come to us? Not enough. You can’t just put out the pot - you have to have some sweet smelling honey too. You need to offer them something tasty… some online resources, books, information, advice, testimonials, references or articles. You may even have to dish it up in different spoonful sizes, because when you target the little bears, the big bears might show up too! And suddenly you have corporate accounts that were looking for your niche services to solve a problem in their department or division as well.

The internet forest is very large, and even with pay per lick (I mean click), many will not find you. So what if you put out some more honey pots? Some with just basic information to interest them and point them to my main honey pot? Some with a taste of the honey to keep them going? Some that are more personal so they may want to meet me and have me show them the route to the honey and the process for making it? And you tell the ranger guides (search engines) about these honey pots too, in case that is all they have to offer some wandering bears picnicking in that neck of the woods?

Of course you will discover it is real work putting out all these little honey pots, and the bigger honey people will loose interest as it takes too many corporate meetings to plan them all and they want to go home at 6 pm. But you are an entrepreneur like many of your prospective clients, so you put out a honey pot every time you can find a spot and some time and some spare honey to taste. For example, I have a number of personal websites, as well as one for every eBook I have published, and many others pointing to our main www.BrighterNaming.com site.

And you can also find me on LinkedIn, MySpace, UC Extension, etc., all with a pointer to the main honey pot.

When you have honey pots spread all over the internet, you will never again sing:

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